


Petals

by Miss_M



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Anger, Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Curses, Depression, Gen, Isolation, Loneliness, Love, Roses, Transformation, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-01 20:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2786594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Beast does not fare well in the solitary years before Belle arrives in his castle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BardicRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BardicRaven/gifts).



> Your prompt made me want to watch this movie for the first time in years, and then I just had to write this. I own nothing.

Though he is leagues away and it is shut up behind walls of stone and latched windows, under a glass bell, he can still smell it. His animal senses and human memories are his prison. They bring him constant reminders of what awaits him in the west wing, where he will return, inevitable as the sunrise. 

A scent like dusty velvet, sweetness balanced between desiccation and putrefaction. 

He prowls the woods, as far as he can get from the castle without leaving his depopulated lands, and still he is certain he can hear it: the dull whisper of a petal falling on the bare tabletop.

_Learn to love another, and earn her love in return…_

He was just a lad the night the enchantress came, shrouded in sleet, clutching a red rose to her withered breast, the skin on her palm so wrinkled and callused she did not seem to feel the sharp thorns. There was dirt under her yellow fingernails, and mud clung to the edge of her sackcloth cloak. 

He turned her away with unkind words, true, for he was young and willful and recently orphaned, his father’s kingdom his to rule or ruin. 

He turned her away, yet she was the one who heard of his reputation and chose to test him only after his mother’s passing. His mother had loved him, as he had loved her, and might have broken his curse at once. 

Cruel and unkind, the enchantress called him, who knew such matters. Why else should she have measured some strange woman’s love as less worthy than that of the prince’s own mother? 

Seven years he’s been living with the false hope the enchantress left him. Hope: the cruelest of his torments. 

Seven years – it feels longer.

The first thing he discarded was his name. 

A human name was as unseemly on him as misspelled peasants’ doggerel in an illuminated volume. Walking on two feet required effort. Heaving himself up from whatever pile of ripped tapestries and soiled cushions spilling feathers on which he’d bedded down took every bit of strength he had. 

Shredding carpets, bedding, and centuries-old tapestries with his claws proved the work of a full moon’s turn in so vast a castle. Then he fell on the furniture, smashing side tables and spindle-legged chairs, thrashing his new bulk on bedsteads till they cracked, roaring so his voice reverberated against the windowpanes. 

Most furnishings which were not his transformed servants, he destroyed in the first year after the enchantress laid the curse on him. Smashing inanimate objects stopped giving him relief almost as soon as he started, but he lacked a reason to stop. 

Sometimes he feels like sinking his claws and teeth into the objects which speak and move and call him ‘master,’ tearing them to bits so they would no longer address him. 

In the early days, they offered to have his portrait removed from sight, but he forbade it. He wanted his painted human eyes haunting his every loping, savage footstep. Yet he shuns reflecting surfaces, rarely ventures into the kitchen: all those shiny pots and pans, as though there were people in the castle in need of cooked food. 

The servants try to cook for him, but he refuses human dishes. He is a beast: whatever will and power to command he still has go toward ensuring he eats raw meat and uncooked eggs off the floor, disdaining even bread crumbled into a bowl of milk with honey. Cogsworth sputters and Lumière adopts that unctuous deferential tone he’s always used when expressing disapproval, but they obey. Ill grace is a servant’s only refuge, and he is often too tired to row with his retainers, not that they realize it: they only see his rages. 

He shunned clothes for a while, but the sight of his nakedness, hairy and clawed, rampant, impossible to ignore or rein in, disgusted him. Thorns and sharp stones are unforgiving on britches, but the servants make certain he always has at least one spare pair, a hemmed slit in the back for his tail and packing twine used in place of delicate laces his claws can hardly manage. He can make do without shirts, but even he feels the cold of bitterest winter and so learns to tolerate cloaks. 

Before half a year had elapsed following the enchantress’ visit, peasants started to slip away. Some became brigands and poachers in the forests surrounding the castle, others stopped paying their tithes and styled themselves lords of the small parcels of land they tilled. Others still went to neighboring princes and begged shelter, the protection of laws enforced by itinerant judges, a ruler who would sit in judgment if someone stole their cows or despoiled their daughters. Their own prince had shown little inclination for the daily duties of a ruler even before the curse. 

Poachers live always under the hangman’s noose. Not so men who sequester another’s land and feast on his bad fortune. Within three years, nibbling away at his borders then carving out ever larger chunks, other lords poached away the beast’s lands. In those copses and crofts, fields and pastures, vineyards and villages, spring bloomed when expected and autumn came heavy with golden leaves and fruits. Within the prince’s shrunken borders all was desolation and wilderness, the land turned feral alongside its ruler. 

After that, it became more difficult to keep track of time, which cantered past like panicked horses. Around what he roughly estimated was the fifth year since the curse, averting his gaze from the mirror shards still stuck in their frames became a habit, walking on all fours a convenience, hardly ever speaking natural. 

The servants avoid him or try in vain to raise his spirits, their desperation bleeding into their feigned good cheer. He can barely imagine a woman’s form any longer, let alone what love might be like, given or received ( _only his mother’s love remains, a dim memory like a sweet fruit once tasted and gobbled too quickly_ ). 

Could it even be love on his part or merely the desire to be a man again, for the servants’ sake if not his own, for they have done nothing to deserve their fate except serve him loyally ( _and yet the enchantress called_ him _cruel and unkind_ )? What would that be like, to be himself again?

He is already himself, he thinks, lucidity like a jagged pebble stuck in his paw. If she were human and perfect, and he were… the beast. No love could grow from such stony ground. 

Sometimes he suspects the enchantress can see him through the rose, as he can see the world through the unbreakable mirror she left him, another clever torture. She sees him and she laughs at him, her lips as red as the rose. If he were to snatch up the accursed flower, cram it into his maw, devour it, what would happen? Would it all be over at last?

He loathes the sight of his paws, the scratch of his claws on bare stone floors, the rumble of even his softest words. But he has no defiance and precious little pride left. The curse is what he is now, and the life in his breast wants to live. 

Seven years: he cannot forget what the passage of time means. To deprive him of his memory and sense of past and future would have robbed the enchantress of her sport. He scarcely looks in the enchanted mirror any more, tolerates his servants’ presence worse and worse. He wishes they would all go away and leave him alone, but where can they go, being what they are? 

So he avoids them, and they mostly keep out of his way while he prowls the castle, the neglected gardens and overgrown woods like any caged animal, and pretends he cannot hear, even when he ventures to the very edges of what’s left of his lands, the fall of petal after petal. 

Wrinkled and papery at the edges, still red as a bleeding heart in the center, the petals strike the dusty surface of the stone table. But for the glass bell encasing the rose, the impact might unleash a storm to raze the castle to the ground and scatter its inhabitants like dry leaves. Finish what the beast so sorely wishes and cannot bring himself to do. 

Only a few petals left: it won’t be long now.


End file.
